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Edward Snowden

For this post, I want to take a closer look at the collocates of ‘man up’, as I find it to be a somewhat problematic phrase used by John Kerry when advising Edward Snowden to return to the US from Russia and face the consequences of his NSA revelations.

“A patriot would not run away,” Mr Kerry said on Wednesday. “If Mr Snowden wants to come back to the United States… we’ll have him on a flight today.”

Mr Kerry also called the former National Security Agency contractor “confused”, adding “this is a man who has done great damage to his country”.

“He should man up and come back to the US,” Mr Kerry said.

For this blog, I use Sketch Engine http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/ and look at the enTenTen12 corpus, which is a 12 billion word corpus of English texts taken from the Internet.

A search of the corpus produced 6,613 instances of the phrase ‘man up’, 0.5 per million.

I am interested in looking at the collocates of this phrase, which produced the following list ordered by MI score:

However, as I am interested in the verbal phrase ‘man up’ and not the prepositional phrase, I had to study concordance lines in order to eliminate collocates which were not associated with the verbal phrase. A second list of collocates was then produced, again ordered by MI score:

Although the phrase ‘man up’ appears to be associated with the act of taking responsibility and accepting the consequences of certain actions, there also appears to be other potential discourses associated with the phrase which may be considered as sexist, demeaning and derogatory. In the next post, I will look at these collocates in context in order to study the discourse prosodies of this verbal phrase further.

I looked at the COCA corpus http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ for examples of this phrase, as I thought it was an interesting term for such a high ranking, powerful states person to use.

In the 450 million word corpus there were 253 instances of this phrase, although not all of them were in the form of a verb phrase. Of the first one hundred concordance lines, the follows are examples of the verb phrase usage:

(EXPLETIVE DELETED) off. ” You know, what Chris? Time to manup. Time to rise up. You’re a grown man now.

Rusty got show. Now, Hemy, you were there. You got to manup. The jig is up, you know? You’re our guy.

And you told him to manup. He did just that. But what has it been like for you

a case of being a weenie. I mean, come on, manup. I mean, this — can you imagine…

y a woman and then you’re going to sue — like, dude, manup, come on. GUTHRIE: Can I say that on today.com…

you look a little bit like a punk. SNYDERMAN: I’m with Donny, manup, move on. Mr-DEUTSCH: Come on. GUTHRIE: She says the claims are

, dad, I did it. I was wrong, I’m sorry. Manup. Put your pants on, sit at the table. You got everything

time and effort. When stuff like this happens, I wish Scott would just manup, deal with random repair hiccups, and in general, do more traditional

Part of the reason is the societal pressure they are under to ” manup ” and not appear vulnerable. ” One of the most powerful things a

But Ive told him he ought to manup and run against a country boy from Dresden, Tennessee.

Manup, Harry Reid. You need to understand that we have a problem with

She wants to abolish Social Security entirely. KING: Roland is trying to manup. (CROSSTALK) MARTIN: John, I will bring up gender in this case

A woman can say to a man, manup. But if Reid made any kind of reference to gender

I got to manup and call a time-out. That’s all we have, everybody. Thanks

Manup, Harry Reid. You need to understand that we have a problem with

And, like I said, he needs to manup and leader up and — and run his own race.

a little bit in the campaign that just ended, tell your colleagues to manup? BROWN: Well I don’t use that term. I think it

Later in the program, we’ll manup with our vuvuzelas, the most overused words of 2010.